Joan of Arc – Captured and Tried

After a series of battle victories and the crowing of Charles VII, Joan was finally captured. The Bishop of Beauvais, Peter Cauchon, in whose jurisdiction she was captured, led her trial for heresy. He was joined by a representative of the Inquisition, whose role it was to seek out and stamp out heresy, as they defined it.

There was much Joan was accused of (including stealing a Bishop’s horse), but there were a couple of main offenses for which she was charged. One was her wearing of men’s clothes, which the church considered an “abomination,” unnatural, and so forth. She explained that St. Catherine has told her to wear men’s clothes so that she could associate with men in battle without difficulties. “Should I wear petticoats?”, George Bernard Shaw has her saying in his St. Joan. She would change to women’s clothing only when the English were driven from France.

But this was symptomatic of the greater charge. The Church viewed it as heresy that she listened to the voices of her saints, that she took her orders directly from God (so she claimed), and not from the learned, devout men of the Church. There are even references to her “Protestantism,” that she spoke to God – or he spoke to her – directly.

Joan was remarkably clever and poised when questioned by the learned Church fathers. When asked if in her vision of St. Michael was the archangel clothed or nude, she responded, “Do you think God could not clothe him?” When asked the trick question, “Are you in a state of grace?” – either a yes or no would get her declared a heretic – she responded, “If I am, may God keep me there, and if I am not, may he put me there.”

Finally, when threatened with torture, Joan fainted, fell ill, then signed the confession of heresy. Cauchon sentenced her to life imprisonment on bread and water. She realized what she had done, she had denied her saints, and she recanted. She was excommunicated.

Once she was excommunicated from the Church, she was no longer protected and the Earl of Warwick’s men immediately took her to the town square and burned her at the stake, as was the custom.

The entire trial was recorded and the transcript still exists!

It’s quite a story. Part inspirational, part gruesome; part historical, part legend; part political, part religious.